Do wishlists matter any more?

The following video from Valve is a must view if you are releasing a game on Steam.

“Wishlists. Do they have an impact on your visibility on Steam? No! With a big asterisks”

Erik Peterson

A lot of indies watched this lecture and a few have taken this statement pretty literally. I have seen a few comments in that r/gamedev subreddit that say something like “See Valve said wishlists don’t matter so why does everyone keep asking for them?”

In today’s blog I wanted to dissect and explain Valve’s comment a bit more. Valve’s statement that wishlists don’t impact your visibility is technically correct, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to market your game anymore and not ask people to ask for wishlists. 

The hierarchy of confidence

I have been reading between the lines of a lot of these Valve talks for a few years and I have formed a bit of a hierarchy for how much Valve trusts certain metrics. Here they are in lowest to highest

1. Traffic (no trust) – If Valve trusted this metric, you could just hire bots to spam your page with hits and trick the algorithm into thinking you were the world’s most anticipated game. On the flip side, if you had a viral tweet about your game that drove a lot of traffic, but it was just a bunch of people saying “Ha look at this game!” but they have no intention of playing it. Maybe someone clicked on your page but they don’t even have a Steam account. They will never buy your game because they aren’t a steam customer. For those two reasons, Valve doesn’t really trust views because it doesn’t tell people whether they are going to buy it. Also a “page visit” could be from anyone. 
2. Wishlist (medium trust) – Valve kind of trusts this metric because they know at least the person who has done the wishlisting has a Steam account. We do theorize that Valve also puts more trust in a wishlist that comes from an account that has bought a certain number of games in their library. But a wishlist can’t always be trusted because if a game launches and it’s buggy or it isn’t as good as was advertised, people won’t buy it. That wishlist was useless. But, for all those negatives, wishlists are the best metric to measure interest before your game is available for purchase. So yes, it isn’t perfect, but until someone can buy your game, it is the best thing we have to judge interest.
3. Purchase (high trust) – This is the gold standard. Because it is literally gold. It is money. People don’t buy games they are not interested in. So Valve can be assured that if someone is going to buy a game, they like it. This is the #1 metric Valve cares about in determining if your game will get promoted in the algorithm. And it is a very simple metric. Did your game make money? Note that they don’t ask “Did your game have a high conversion rate?” The purchase metric is very simple: HOW MUCH MONEY did your game earn?

You do need wishlists to get into popular upcoming

So as soon after Erik Peterson said “Wishlists don’t have an impact on your visibility,” he said

“There is a section that I pointed out, the Popular Upcoming section, that is affected by the number of wishlists that you have.” 

Erik Peterson

Appearing in Popular upcoming is a very important thing to do before you launch because it gives you a lot of visibility when you need it most. When you are featured in Popular Upcoming expect ~750-2000 wishlists per day.

Popular upcoming is also the first rung in the ladder on your path to the premium featuring on Steam. After appearing in popular upcoming, a game with good sales will typically go on to New and Trending (if it is not an Early Access Game) and then spend a long time in the Discovery Queue, then maybe appear in the “More Like This” section. But if you don’t collect enough wishlists to get into Popular Upcoming it is very very hard to access those higher visibility rungs. 

So how many wishlists are required for Popular Upcoming?

I wrote a post explaining how popular upcoming works back in 2022. Here is the best part of it: “I and many others have advised trying to get about 7,000-10,000 minimum wishlists before launch. The algorithm for popular upcoming is not based on a raw number but I still recommend people try for a 7000-10,000” 

I also describe exactly how popular upcoming works in this explainer post.

So, yes, Valve confirms you need to collect wishlists to appear in the first rung on the ladder of Steam visibility.

But a publisher told me I need to collect at least 30,000, or was it 50,000 wishlists?

I have heard this too (because I have consulted for publishers). Here is the official statement from Valve in that video

“I’ve actually talked to developers all over the world that claim that they’ve heard that you need a certain number of wishlists to appear on the front page or you’re never gonna get featured unless you get a certain specific number of wishlists, maybe it’s 50,000 or a 100,000 wishlists. I’m here to tell you that that’s just simply not the case.”

Erik Peterson

He is 100% correct. There is no magic number. There is nowhere in the algorithm that says

if (yourGame.wishlists >= 30,000) { 
     moveToFrontPage(yourGame); 
}

As explained above, once your game is on sale, the only metric Valve trusts is how much MONEY did your game earn. Then if you earn enough MONEY then they show you in more places and you earn even more MORE money and more and more and the virtuous cycle spins you into millionaire status.

BUUUUT publishers are still kind of right when their goal is to get you up to 30,000 or more wishlists. 

See, until you launch we don’t know if your game is going to convert at 1%, 3%, 5%, 10%, 20%, 40% (yes all of those conversions are possible, I have seen the data for lots of games). Before they go on sale, games are like Schrodinger’s cat in that box. Once you launch, the box is opened and we get to look in and see what kind of conversion rate you have. But we just don’t know before release. 

The reason publishers try to get 30,000+ wishlists; it is buffer against things going wrong.

In that video Valve mentioned that the next rung in the visibility ladder is New & Trending and your placement there depends on whether your game surpasses a top-secret threshold of dollars earned. If it turns out your game’s conversion rate is low like 1%-5%, a publisher still wants you to show up in New & Trending. So by having more wishlists by launch you are building a “cushion” that can improve your chances at getting into New & Trending.

Let’s pretend the magic number to get into New & Trending is $10,000. (THIS JUST A NUMBER I MADE UP TO MAKE THE MATH EASY. Please do not quote this as a real number that you need to get to. I don’t know what the number is in real life.)

Let’s also pretend that your game disappoints at launch and only has a 3% conversion rate and that your game costs $19.00.

If you only collected 7000 wishlists pre launch then this would be the math:

7000 wishlists * 3% conversion * $19.00 = $3,990 gross revenue

BUT, if you managed to collect 30,000 wishlists at launch, but also had a weak conversion, your math would look like this:

30,000 wishlists * 3% conversion * $19.00 = $17,100 gross revenue

BOOM! You got into New & Trending. You will get a bunch of extra sales because you will be featured on the front page of Steam making you and your publisher happy. 

See? Because your game had a “cushion” of extra wishlists, you cleared the $10,000 threshold and got into New & Trending and thus got an extra boost in visibility even though you had a poor conversion rate.

So in conclusion, it’s correct that there is no Wishlist threshold for getting post-launch-visibility. BUT, the reason publishers want 30,000+ wishlists at launch is because it increases the possibility that you will clear the monetary threshold that propels you up the Steam visibility ladder. 

So I am sorry, you still need to collect a lot of wishlists before launch.

But Wishlist Inflation

This is one of those ghost stories that are told all over reddit. Some guy launched his game with 100,000 wishlists but had a 1% conversion rate and then his game FAIIIIILED. Then that guy posts that this misfortune proves that asking and begging for wishlists is causing wishlist inflation and wishlists are not valuable any more.

I have seen the numbers for games that are winners and those that are not so lucky and it is totally possible to see a 1% conversion rate despite having THOUSANDS of wishlists. I have unfortunately seen it. But very recently I have also seen a game that got a 30%+ conversion rate. 

Here is the unfortunate thing: wishlist conversion rate depends on how excited fans are for your game. If they are SUPER excited and all the streamers are playing your game, and you get into every festival you apply for, and your game is “in the discourse”, your conversion rate will be high. But if there is nothing novel about the game, or it is in an over-saturated genre, the conversion rate can be low. 

One thing that I often see that is left out of these “wishlist inflation” conversations is how long the Steam page was up before launch. So if the game launched with 30,000 wishlists that is pretty impressive. But if it turns out that the game earned 30,000 because the Steam page was up for 7 years, that means that they were only collecting wishlists at a rate of 4,285 per year. That isn’t very impressive. 

I would rather be a game that is launching with 7,000 wishlists and has been on the store for 1 month than a game that has 30,000 wishlists that has been on the store for 7 years. The “velocity” of the first game indicates that people are excited. 

Also don’t misinterpret this section as me saying wishlists for a long-in-development game “get old.” Wishlists don’t go stale. I wrote about that for the game Cosmoteer and Zero Sievert. Instead it is just a factor of wishlist velocity. I recommend you just take the total number of wishlists and divide it by the years on the store.

I have extensive marketing performance benchmarks (here) and I wrote a whole piece on what normal wishlist rates are here.

My gut tells me, if I see a game that collects about 15,000 wishlists a year, that game has a good chance at being hot (but there is no guarantee). If the game gets fewer than 4,000 per year, that indicates softer support. 

What I find is when Steam shoppers are excited about a game the wishlists come in faster, and they convert at a higher rate. Games that are not exciting to shoppers have slower wishlisting velocity, and they convert at a lower rate. This is why it is important to look at several factors before launch. 

Summary

When Erik Peterson at Valve said that “Wishlists don’t have an impact on your visibility” he was saying that other than Popular Upcoming there is no direct connection between a wishlist threshold and getting better placement on the front page. 

However, wishlists do facilitate better sales and those sales turn into dollars, which in turn give you visibility.

It is like saying “The fuse isn’t what explodes.” Which is correct, that is the bomb. But in reality, the fuse is required to ignite the bomb. So don’t listen to those kids that say “don’t light the fuse, it isn’t what explodes”